An English teacher from rural Maine won the $1 million Global Teacher Prize on Sunday after 42 years of work as an innovator and pioneer in teaching literature.

Nancie Atwell was selected from a pool of 1,300 applicants from 127 countries. The teacher plans to donate the full amount to the Center for Teaching and Learning which was created for the purpose of developing and disseminating teaching methods.

Let’s be clear. Higher education is not in crisis. It's in motion, and it always has been. Higher education evolves as knowledge expands, societies change and new technologies are introduced. This does not mean that we should relax: There should be no comfort taken in maintaining the status quo.

As our universities and colleges undergo an intense period of evolution we should be asking ourselves questions, the right questions: Is higher education evolving in the right way? Will it continue to be able to meet the needs of students and their families?

A few years ago, while Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and others were introducing MOOCs, a small group of researchers and data scientists at Carnegie Mellon University were quietly focused on something that may prove to be far more revolutionary: understanding the intersection of online pedagogy, educational technology, and rapid advances in the learning sciences.

The primary function of most MOOCs today is the dissemination of knowledge to the world. What would it look like if the opposite were true? What if MOOCs convened communities and individuals to focus on co-creation rather than dissemination?

Davidson College partnered with Middlebury College and OpenIDEO to pilot an “Inverse MOOC,” where the MOOC is flipped from a content delivery platform to a community of inquiry.

Village Green Virtual, is a public charter school in Rhode Island opened in 2013 with a mission to “personalize instruction” for every student. Each student’s needs are being met. If they need more time, they can get it. If they have an aptitude for a topic, they can go faster.

"We’ve found that teachers are critical, and, in fact, we need more of them than we originally thought. This kind of virtual school is not an effective personnel-reduction strategy.” said Robert Pilkington, Village Green Virtual school founder.